This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to using social activity to predict copyrighted material, abusive content, or any other unauthorized content that is posted on a social networking system.
Any system that enables users to share content with each other must deal with users who share unauthorized and abusive content. Examples of unauthorized content may include anything that violates the system's terms of use, such as pornography, gratuitous violence, or copyrighted work. Other content sharing systems have used information specific to the content to detect potential abuse. For example, video sharing websites may give users the option to flag a video for review if they find it offensive or suspect it violates intellectual property laws. This method is not always successful in detecting unauthorized content items, which leaves the company behind the system liable to legal action such as copyright infringement lawsuits.
With the rise in popularity of social networking systems, users have been voluntarily divulging more of their personal information, such as their friends, geographic location, preferred television shows and movies, hobbies, and activities to social networks. Social networking systems also generate additional information about each of its users based on their actions within the social network, such as their communication with other users and the content they consume. While all of this information is recorded and stored, it has not been used to predict the nature of any content items that users interact with.
In particular, the social activity surrounding a piece of content on a social network has not been used to predict whether the content is unauthorized. Any new method of detecting and disabling unauthorized content like copyright infringement or pornography is important to social network administrators who wish to minimize legal liabilities and maintain a clean and controllable user experience. Although the data is available on the social networking system, existing tools to detect unauthorized content do not use the social activity surrounding a content item.